Happiness, one day at a time.

Tuesday, Jul 11th

In Mo Gawdat’s Solve for Happy, he spends a chapter on fear, and how it controls us. Sometimes that control is obvious, and sometimes it’s more subtle. But being controlled by fear always incurs a cost. It may be a a material cost, in the choices we make for ourselves, hedging our bets; at the very least there’s a mental cost is worrying about futures that never come to pass.

Gawdat is a proponent of facing our fears in order to liberate ourselves from them. He also suggests interrogating fears using a series of questions:

What is (realistically) the worst that can happen?

If that does happen, so what?

How likely is it?

Is there anything I can do to prevent this scenario?

Can I recover?

What will happen if I do nothing?

What is the best-case scenario?

Today I’m going to work through this list for one of my fears, and see if I can loosen its hold on me.